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Sandy Petersen 🪔

@SandyofCthulhu

May 5

Like anyone else, game companies can be cheated, and I witnessed this several times. In 1993, we at id Software played Doom together over our internal network. Now, you have to realize that at the time, we thought few people would want to play by modem or over the nascent internet. But we wanted that functionality, because it was super fun and we liked it.

Now, John Carmack didn't want to program the internet code. We hired a guy who lived in (IIRC) California to do the code remotely. The deal, as it was explained to me, was that he was finishing a project for his current company, and doing our code in his spare time, with his boss's knowledge. When his project was finished, he'd join us in Texas.

Well, when we were ready for our internet code, we called his company in California and got the guy's boss. He laughed hard at us. He told us, "This guy is a good programmer, but he is a compulsive liar. He knows he can never hold a job anywhere else, and I get he hasn't done a lick of work on your connectivity stuff. He just took your money." Well ... the boss was right. We'd been swindled.

Worse, we didn't have that code. So John Carmack spent 2 weeks quickly hammering together something that mostly worked, and then we released Doom. There was some kind of issue with the way we did it, that if Doom was being played with a lot of people on the same net, even if they weren't playing each other, it multiplied the information packets hugely and crashed the system. Within a month Doom was banned on basically every college campus in the country.

So we hired someone to give us new, robust, code and in a month or two Doom was all it could be. Of course John Carmack's not to blame - his strength was in 3-D, not connectivity. Plus he had only 2 weeks to throw it together. That dude in California was the villain and he can rot.
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In 1999, I made friends with a couple who'd just moved into our church congregation. The husband turned out to be an artist. He was pretty good, and Ensemble was looking for new artists, so I got him an interview. He was hired, and given a $5000 signing bonus.

TWO WEEKS LATER he moved to California, where he had a totally different job waiting for him. He took the job with Ensemble solely to pocket the signing bonus.

I was furious because not only had I recommended him, but the dude was from my church and it reflected on both me and my faith. I don't blame the other Ensemble leads for feeling I should have known, and that was a dark day for me.
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Then there is the sad tale of Rogue Entertainment. They were a brand new studio which was in the same building as id Software. Naturally we were buddies. The owners from Rogue played in my game sessions at home. We were close.

Well Rogue hit it big when they got chosen to do American McGee's Alice for Electronic Arts. They worked hard, and I feel did a pretty good job. The game sold quite well, and my friends at Rogue were excited to get their big payoff. They had been living hand-to-mouth on Electronic Arts' advances, but now by their calculations they were about to get well over $300,000 that they were contractually owed, all at once!

Well they waited and they waited and basically what they told me is that Electronic Arts illegally and bald-facedly simply didn't pay them. They withheld the money with almost no excuse at all. Their plan was that without any source of income, Rogue Entertainment would go bankrupt, and then they wouldn't owe anyone anything.

Sadly their plan worked. Rogue couldn't afford any kind of lawyer who would be able to go up against EA's regiment of shysters, and it fell apart. I still believe this was super-short-sighted of EA, because Alice in Wonderland could have been a terrific IP. They could easily have milked it for at least 1-2 more games, plus then with Rogue on a string, they could have expanded to other children's tales made into shooters. They would have made far more millions than the few hundred thousand they kept by killing Rogue.

The bottom line here is EA is evil, not smart. But they are evil 100% of the time. Never ever trust them.
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Sandy Petersen 🪔

@SandyofCthulhu

Apr 23

Let's talk about horror game & adventure design! As the guy who introduced the game world to Lovecraft & Cthulhu, and helped develop Arkham Horror, Doom, Doom 2, (Cthulhu Wars & Planet Apocalypse), here are four lessons I've learned in the last 46 years.
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#CallofCthulhu #GameDesign

First rule: build dread through the unknown. Jump scares can work in movies, but they do NOT work in games. You need to keep the players unaware of a monster's full potentiality.

Think of the first Alien movie - part of the reason the creature was so fearsome is you literally didn't know what it was doing. It kept changing behavior and shape. In the escape pod it seemed almost passive - Ripley had to stimulate it into action. It seemed to be sealing itself in with mucus, like it had to go on with its life cycle.

In Call of Cthulhu, while I had to stat out the monsters for game purposes, I tried to leave a lot of open-ended material for keepers to work with. For example, in one scenario (The Monster of Macapa), the players discover that the mi-go have developed a form of their fungal nature which is actually able to infect humans like a disease. In another scenario, the players were holding up in an old apartment building, knowing that Dimensional Shamblers were trying to get them. I had frost appear on the windows of the building - etching patterns suddenly, then the frost began moving inside. Neither of these facets of those creatures are spelled out in the game, but never did a player complain about it. I think in part because I wanted the monsters to be mysterious always. (Compare to a D&D game where I heard players arguing loudly whether a Nilbog can cancel out a Power Word Kill as the DM frantically thumbed through the monster book.)

As another example, one of my signature tricks in Doom was to present the player with an empty room. In the center is a pedestal with some useful item on top (BFG, soulsphere, etc.). I may even have a spotlight shining on it. The player KNOWS that if he grabs the goody all hell will literally break loose. He feels trepidation and fear at the unknown. But he grabs it anyway, so all is well from my point of view.

In a game you can't be quite as mysterious and "unknown" as in a book or film, but you can pull it off fairly well.
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Second Rule (note - these rules are not exhaustive): player agency. If the player is being railroaded through an adventure, then he is no longer invested. You, the game designer, are just using him as a prop for your own ideas. He may as well be watching a movie.

But you want the player to be creeped out in your game, not to be an apathetic spectator. So he needs to be involved. This doesn't mean he has to make all correct decisions.

What's more fun in Doom? To correctly kill all monsters with the minimum ammo expenditure? Or to walk into the secret level E2M9 with all the barons of hell, then when you try to escape you run into a mess of cacodemons?! It really pushes you into adrenaline.

The best stories I hear from Call of Cthulhu or Doom players are about near-disasters. Or even actual disasters. The game is about having fun, and even a disastrous game which got your character killed can be super-fun.

This is one reason I usually let players run their own characters who've gone insane in Call of Cthulhu. They always seem to appreciate being allowed to be demented in their own way, and they're off the hook trying to help the party.

What I'm trying to say is that letting players have fun making mistakes is good. Just as you don't necessarily want the heroes in a horror movie to be smart every time, your players shouldn't have to be. This does mean you don't need to kill them for the smallest error. They need to have a chance to get out. Let them tell that story. And then, even if they're killed, they have a better story about "How I almost escaped the cultists".
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Sandy Petersen 🪔

@SandyofCthulhu

Mar 24

Black slavery in the USA was not a product of capitalism. In the United States, the NORTH was capitalist. The South was pre-capitalist, and their economy was very different.

For example, in the antebellum South, if you owned a cloth factory, you yourself were a tailor. Your workers were your apprentices, indentured workers, or slaves. They could not leave your employ to go elsewhere. No one would hire them, and you could legally beat them if they tried to leave.

In the North, what you needed to own a cloth factory was money - capital. You invested your money in a factory, then you hired competent workers to man it. They could leave your employ whenever they wanted.

A northern worker would leave you if he could get a better salary elsewhere, so you had to pay your people enough to keep them around. This is how capitalism benefits the workers - with freedom of labor.
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Of course, business owners hate the "freedom of labor" and "freedom of competition" aspects of capitalism, and they are always looking for ways to lock in their workers so we can't leave. This is where NDAs, signing contracts, not-yet-vested stock options, etc. all come from. Even worse things happened - company towns, strikebreakers, and monopolies, all of which are in fact attempts to stifle capitalism in the business owner's favor.

But back when Capitalism was brand-new just before the American Civil War, it worked pretty good, and here were the results:

in 1860, the average northerner was WORTH only half as much as the average southerner. The southerner owned stuff - he owned land, he owned a house, he owned slaves.

The northern factory worker didn't own land, he lived in a flat or townhouse, he had no slaves. So if the northerner was to cash in his wealth, he would seem much poorer than a southerner.

HOWEVER, the average northern had an income about 3 times as much as the average southerner. This was partly because slaves weren't paid much (most masters gave them a pittance), but also because wages were massively depressed because you literally couldn't change jobs, so why should your boss pay you more?
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When northern armies penetrated the South this was hammered home. Letters from soldiers were appalled at living conditions in the South. The non-capitalist nature of the South affected their farms - the person who bought your cotton & tobacco usually had a monopoly so could pay you whatever he wanted. That same guy often control the local drover's wagonry, and might even have an interest in one of the 100+ teensy tiny railroad companies in the South.

in the North, a farmer could sell to a variety of dealers, and usually negotiate a better deal. The railroad companies were fewer in number, but far larger, so they were never beholden to some local despot. Years later, the railroad companies got big for their britches and started to form their own monopolies of course, but most of this hadn't happened by 1860.

Why didn't the north have slaves? They were making far more money by having actual skilled workers even if those workers didn't have forcible loyalty. The South misinterpreted the Northern men as "wage slaves". Southern propaganda claimed Northern men HAD to stay with their bosses to get their salaries. In the first place, this wasn't true - Northern workers switched jobs all the time. In the second place, even if it had been true, the Southern practice of "you can't switch jobs because massa will hit you with a stick" is hardly morally superior.

The South literally propagandized against the North because they thought capitalism was bad, and they wanted the mercantilist, paternalistic system of the South. (They didn't call capitalism by that name, but it's quite clear what they were talking about in their condemnation of shopkeepers and trusts.)

The Civil War wasn't just slavery vs. freedom. It wasn't just region vs. region. It was the triumph of capitalism over feudalism and I am proud of my ancestors who participated in it and helped to destroy one of the biggest evils in the world.

Sadly, slavery persisted after the American Civil War (it's still around today), but the fact it was crushed in the South was still a huge blessing. Even when the South tried to roll it back after Reconstruction, they weren't able to completely destroy the new system.
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Sandy Petersen 🪔

@SandyofCthulhu

Oct 21, 2025

I've posted this before, but why not again?

In 1997, I was the lead designer of Ensemble's next cool IP - "Sorceress", which was a magic-based real time strategy game. We'd moved quite a way along it. We had elves being produced from tree groves, wraiths created by transforming corpses, and so forth. It was rapidly becoming a whole game. But Age of Empires 2 was happening at the same time, and Ensemble Studios wasn't that big.

So every week, the management would come to me and say something like, "We need Don to switch over to Age 2. That's okay, right?" Well I'm a team player so sure take Don. But the hits kept coming. By January or February, ALL BUT TWO members of my team had been poached for Age 2. All I had left was me, a top programmer, and a top artist.

So I went to the company's suits, and said, "There's no way I can create an entire new RTS with three people. But I have a suggestion. When I was working on roleplaying games back at Chaosium, we found that each expansion sold something like 25%-35% as many copies as the original. If that holds true for RTS games, we could put together an expansion for Age of Empires on the cheap, taking only a few months, and a tiny team. If the expansion sold even 10% as well as Age, we'd make a mint."
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The management agreed - unlike many company "suits" they were smart, game-savvy, and forward-thinking. I then presented my core idea for the expansion: "After the ancient times, Rome took over. Rome's cool and pretty sexy. Let's base the expansion on Rome. We'll add Rome and three other civilizations, all enemies of Rome, like Carthage for example. We can also fix little balance problems that have come up since Age was published. Everyone will want the expansion for the new civs at a minimum."

Now my bosses were pretty excited. When they presented the idea to MicroSoft, the morons in Redmond poured ice water.

"Our experience has shown that game expansions don't sell."

But Ensemble's management already had fallen in love with Rise of Rome, and as I'd pointed out, it was a cheap experiment. So we went ahead without MicroSoft's approval (at this time, they hadn't yet bought Ensemble). Also, I think the goons at MicroSoft thought the expansion would just be a bunch of campaigns and scenarios. While scenarios would definitely be included, my vision was that it would contain something for everybody. New units, new technologies, AND new civs.

Even if you only ever wanted to play Hittites, say, you'd want Rise of Rome because it adds Slingers, Camel Riders, Fire Galleys, Scythe Chariots, Logistics, Martyrdom, Medicine, and the Tower Shield to your civ. The Tower Shield is particularly useful because Hittites rely heavily on archers.

And if you wanted to experiment with some of the new civs ... well then, the world was your oyster.
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As far as I can tell in my research, this is one of the first, if not THE first time that a computer game expansion had more than just extra scenarios or levels, but actually changed fundamental gameplay. So I'm willing to take credit for changing the nature of expansions forever. Even if we do find someone who did it first, I'm willing to bet that Rise of Rome did it bigger and I hope better. So if you hate expansions, blame me. If you like them, you can buy me a diet Dr Pepper some day at a convention when we meet.

Anyway, Rise of Rome proved a gigantic hit. We sold a million copies - compared to the 3 million copies that Age of Empires sold, that's pretty creditable. And since Rise of Rome cost only a tiny fraction as much as Age of Empires, it really made bank.

Plus it kept doing so. You see, Rise of Rome came out almost exactly a year after Age of Empires, and when it did, it BOOSTED Age of Empires sales. When people saw both games in the store, they naturally picked them both up.

Then, when the Gold Edition of Age of Empires was released, packaged with Rise of Rome, Microsoft got ANOTHER big boost in sales for both products. Rise of Rome was the gift that just kept on giving. It gave Microsoft three bites at the Age apple.
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Sandy Petersen 🪔

@SandyofCthulhu

Oct 20, 2025

Why make orcs? What is the advantage? It's not just because they're evil - Sauron can get all the evil humans he wants. Here are the reasons I've parsed by reading LotR and making logical biological deductions from this.

Humans breed extremely slowly. Elves and dwarfs are even worse. We know that orcs "multiply" over a course of only a decade or two, so what's happening? Well, we know orcs are smaller than humans. Chimps, which I think are comparable in size to orcs, have a gestation period 5 weeks shorter than humans, and orcs might be shorter - a deer is even larger, and has a gestation period 3 months shorter, so it's not size that matters. Since orcs are specifically and magically bred for war, my guess is they are even shorter. In fact, let's take a page from the Hildebrandt brothers and assume that orcs breed and grow similarly to pigs.

If this is the case, orcs have a gestation of about 3 months, and grow to 120 lbs (a typical size) in another 3-4 months. Orcs might grow faster than pigs, because they are more carnivorous, and thus are getting more protein & fat in their diet. Now, not everything about the orc-pig comparison is in the orc's favor. Adult hogs are MUCH bigger than orcs, so they can give birth to litters. I imagine most orc births are to a single child - which is then taken to warrens of multiple orc-spawn raised by a few caretakers. I do not believe orcs have any kind of family life or even a nuclear family.

So - an orc mother gets pregnant, has a kid 3 months later, nurses it for 3-6 weeks, then abandons it. It reaches adult size in another 3-6 months, gets some military training and it's off to the war. That is a FAST-breeding creature. No wonder they felt that the Age of Men was over!
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And it's even worse from the human viewpoint, because of the numbers of orcs that can fight. In a human society, typically no more than 10-11% are in the military. In a modern society it's even less. The grossly over-militarized society of Imperial Japan had less than 5% of the population in arms. Now, in older barbaric societies, such as gauls or vikings, there was a higher percentage, but it still isn't amazingly more than 30% or so. Children don't fight till they're 15 years old or more. The elderly don't fight. With vanishingly few exceptions, women don't fight. Essential workers don't fight except in extremis - it's a loser's mentality to send farmers & miners & tailors to war, because it eats your seed corn (so to speak).

But orcs? They're only children for a few months. If they even HAVE elderly, they are probably few in number, and act as caretakers of the young. I believe orc females look exactly like the males - the same size, the same look. They are as flat-chested as chimps or gorillas. Similar voices. They dress the same. I suppose if you pulled off their trews you could tell which was which but yuck.

So basically 80-90% of an orc population is able to fight. If you have a population of humans equal in size to a group of orcs, then the orc fighters will outnumber the human warriors 3, 4, or even 8 to 1. Just like we see at Helm's Deep, where the fortress is full of the old, the crippled, the women, and the children, with a much smaller part being warriors.
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You might argue - well, orcs need lots of food to multiply so rapidly, to which I answer, "Yup". I imagine orcs REALLY QUICKLY outbreed their food supply, like rabbits, bullfrogs, brown recluse spiders, or aphids. And then they have to come raiding down out of the hills to get more food - which is exactly what we see the orcs do.

BUT in some cases, the orcs get a powerful, magical master - such as the Balrog, the Witch-King of Angmar, or Saruman, or Sauron. In this case, these wise and potent leaders are able to organize a system to breed up the orcish numbers to almost inconceivable numbers. Think of Saruman needing to chop down Fangorn to fuel his furnaces, or Sauron raising vast crops of coarse vegetables in Nurn to feed his hordes.

This isn't needed for humans - we grow in numbers too slowly. It takes 50-100 years to double for us.
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Sandy Petersen 🪔

@SandyofCthulhu

Aug 24, 2025

Naysayers and party-poopers are always trying to explain to me why giant bugs can't exist. "Well akshually" they say. Well, I've spent a LOT of time studying insects and I WANT GIANT BUGS. Don't you?

So let's talk about how to make this happen. First off, giant arthropods have existed before. The best-known are Arthropleura (land) and eurypterids (sea), both of which got to about 10 feet long. But they're not elephant sized yet, so let's keep hammering at it.
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One of the most common reasons is because insects breathe via spiracles, which rely partly on tissue diffusion, which only is useful up to about 3 inches, which limits a spiracle-reliant creature to a width of about 6 inches.

However, there are arthropods which use lungs - scorpions & spiders. And ocean-dwellers don't use spiracles (they use gills). But even if we only discuss insects, these creatures have shown incredible adaptive powers. I am sure they could evolve an enhancement for their spiracles if they needed it. Perhaps a pump system to move air deeper for the spiracles. They already have it to an extent - many larger insects use muscle movements to aid breathing - look at how a grasshopper or wasp pulsate.

We still need another auxiliary system for a huge insect. But since insects have evolved cast systems, metamorphosis, hyperparasitism, and flight, I think they could figure this one out.
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The next reason given is the square cube law. You know - if you're twice as big in every dimension, you weigh 8 times as much. Well duh. But the square cube law applies to EVERYTHING, not just insects. And scientists seem to not fully understand its limitations as applied to animals. When I was a kid, it was common knowledge that brontosaurs couldn't walk on land because they were too heavy, and that Pteranodon was the largest imaginable flying creature. Now we know that sauropods far larger than brontosaurs lived exclusively on land, and we have fossils of dozens of flying horrors that could eat Pteranodon for breakfast - and quite possibly did.

Now yes, you can't scale an ant up to elephant-size. You have to modify its limbs and its structure. Either more limbs or thicker limbs. That's why an elephant is the exact same shape as a hyrax scaled up. (They're relatives!)

More cogently, it's been pointed out that arthropods have an exoskeleton meaning the mass of the exoskeleton would keep getting more. But insects could easily keep the exoskeleton at whatever thickness needed for protection, while evolving internal struts & supports. Ever eaten a crab? Did you notice the internal structures inside the crab to support its body & muscles?

I agree that a elephant-size beetle wouldn't have a shell proportionately as thick as a ladybug. But it could still be pretty thick, because one advantage of the exoskeleton is that it magnifies the mechanical advantage of their muscles, which is why an insect can be stronger than a similar-sized vertebrate.
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